The vampire’s freedom

Mumia Abu-Jamal WW photo

Taken from a Sept. 21, 2006, audio column

The words “freedom” and “democracy” spilled like water from a fountain.

If they were not spoken at the United Nations, they might have more resonance.

If they were spoken by someone other than the American president, George W. Bush, they might provoke more than dismissal.

But they were.

U.S. President Bush lectured to the U.N. delegates with a tone and turn of phrase that almost suggested that the panorama arrayed before him were schoolchildren.

He spoke of U.S. efforts to “defend civilization” and, pointedly, glaringly claimed, “We respect Islam.”

He told Iranian delegates, “The U.S. respects you.”

It seemed incredible, almost vaudevillian. Some global delegates peered at the U.S. president in disbelief. Others wore smiles that seemed ripe to burst into guffaws any minute.

It seemed ridiculous because the words contrasted so strongly with the world we all know: the glaring failures in Iraq; the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan.

Diplomats are trained to, well, use diplomacy and tact.

Their faces were immobile masks hiding inner words locked within minds like, “Can you believe this guy?” or “Freedom? Democracy? Yeah—right!” Such words might’ve had more power had not Iraq been the plummeting disaster that it is.

And U.S. puppets installed in Middle East countries? They are both enormously unpopular in their new so-called ‘democracies’ and fear their own people more than anything else.

When empires speak of “freedom,” they don’t mean the freedom of their subject peoples. They mean the freedom of their elites to pluck from the stocks of the poor and the powerless.

It’s the freedom to feed upon those whom they see as their imperial prey.

It’s the false “freedom” of vampires.

Writer Jerry Fresia captured the spirit of that kind of imperial freedom in “Toward an American Revolution” (Boston: South End Press, 1988), where he quotes the late U.S. State Department honcho, George Kennan, telling Latin American ambassadors that America’s major foreign policy concern was “the protection of our raw materials.” (Notice the imperial “our.”) Kennan also criticized the idea that governments have to care about the “welfare” of the people. Fresia writes:

“This condemnation of the idea that government has a direct responsibility for the welfare of the people captures wonderfully the legacy of the vision of empire and the Lockean notion of rights: 1) The globe is up for grabs. It is all potentially private property, suitable for development. You are free to try and acquire it and if you do, you own it. And what you do with it once you own it is up to you. It’s your right, unless, that is, 2) a group of people, Church-based groups, unions, or popular coalitions who believe in community more than in free enterprise, gain control of a government and define limits to acceptable individual activity in accord with ethical standards. 3) The greatest threat to private power (free enterprise, the market system, contracts, production for profit and private ownership of productive property) has primarily been public power (a government controlled by common people for the welfare of the common people in the interests of community).” [pp. 81-82]

Even with the megaphones of the corporate media and the vaunted power of the presidential bully pulpit, Bush’s message got swamped by something far more powerful. Truth.

Like a latter-day Orwell, his words evoked something quite unlike what was intended.

When he said “freedom,” people thought “secret CIA prisons.”

When he said “democracy,” people thought “puppets.”

When he said “liberty,” people thought “occupation.”

When he said “human rights,” people thought “Abu Ghraib.”

When he said “We respect Islam,” people thought of piles of naked Muslim men in Iraq, or men chained to the floor at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. They thought of the many, many people who are caged in immigration prisons on pretextual charges, and others sent for rendition to repressive regimes throughout the Arab world. They thought of U.S. support for these regimes for decades.

Bush is shouting, but no one hears him.

Go to www.prisonradio.org to hear Abu-Jamal’s audio columns.